Why the Rise of the Robot Workforce Is a Good Thing

Will robots take over the workforce? And if—or when—they do, what jobs will be left for us humans?

These were among the biggest workplace and management questions at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin over the weekend. Several of the panels at the sprawling tech conference focused on our futurerobotoverlords, with many of the discussions taking a rosy view that the workforce will indeed be dominated by robots in the not-too-far future–and why that is a good thing.

Carl Bass, the chief executive of Autodesk, acknowledged that workplace automation has eliminated or reduced many manufacturing jobs, and will continue to do so in the future, leading to major shifts in the labor market. Entire industries, such as trucking, will eventually be disrupted by robotic advances like self-driving cars, he said. (Bass cited the book, “The Second Machine Age,” by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee as a source for this robot-heavy scenario.)

But, Bass asked: “Are the jobs lost to automation ones that you would want for your children?” Few parents, he said, dreamed their kids would someday become fuel pumpers or elevator operators, jobs already replaced by automation. In the next 30 years, Bass added, smart machines and robots will outnumber humans on the planet.

Bass presented some outlandish ideas to help societies deal with the structural changes generated by a robot-heavy workforce, including taxing economic output rather than income, or implementing a “negative income tax,” in which governments pay citizens a stipend in order to guarantee a level of income.

“With our creativity and imagination, we will find harmony with the robots,” Bass said.

Meanwhile, other discussions focused on identifying jobs were likely to remain safe from robots. Heather Knight, a Carnegie Mellon roboticist who studies social interactions between humans and robots, suggested that hairdressers might be safe. But not because robots can’t cut hair—she said the relationship between hairdressers and their clients simply can’t be automated. (And, she added, some people might be wary of a robot holding a sharp blade so close to their necks, although plenty of robots already perform delicate surgery.)

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